Why would Barnes & Noble make a deal to bring predictive analytics services to universities? Phil Hill (more here) says it suggests recently acquired B&N subsidiary LoudCloud "is focusing more intently on analytics after years of being 'here, there and everywhere' in the ed-tech market." But it also represents a deeper push by the publisher to get into learning technology generally. Here's the vision: "Imagine that a system of collecting and analyzing data was created by academics for academics. You own your data; you don’t need to purchase reports or subscribe to a service to get that information. It won’t be sold to outside vendors, it is standardized, and you can, with relative ease, access de-identified data from other member institutions within the consortium for research purposes."